Whenever we have History and we have to imagine what it would feel like to be a Roman centurion or a Tudor queen or a London child in the Blitz I can always pretend I’m there and I can write it all down and Mrs Hunter gives me excellent marks. Even though I’m imagining so hard I forget about paragraphs and punctuation and my spelling goes all to pot.
But it’s OK at this school. Everything’s fine. I’ve caught up. It’s not like some of the other schools where they thought I was really thick or mad or they knew all about me and the teachers whispered and raised their eyebrows and the kids teased me and called me names. Oh God, I sound as if I should be playing my violin, sooooo sorry for poor little me.
I’m not poor, though I am little. No-one knows about me at this school. I’m just April and I’m in Year Nine and people only know me because I’m the girl with the long fair hair who goes round with Cathy and Hannah. No-one thinks I’m odd, although I get teased a bit for being a crybaby. I howled in class the other day when we were told about destitute child refugees, without their parents. I was still blubbering at breaktime. Cathy had her arm round me and Hannah was mopping my eyes with a wad of tissues when a teacher walking past got all fussed and asked if I was unwell. Hannah said, ‘It’s just April, she’s always crying,’ and Cathy said, ‘We call her April Showers.’
That’s my nickname now. It’s better than April Fool.
It’s much, much better than Dustbin Baby.
That’s the real me. I was in the newspapers. I suppose it’s a special claim to fame. Not many people make the front page the day they’re born. But not many people get chucked out like rubbish. One look and it’s, ‘No way, don’t want this baby, let’s chuck her in the dustbin.’
Funny kind of cradle. A pizza box for a pillow, newspaper as a coverlet, scrunched-up tissues serving as a mattress.
What kind of mother could dump her own baby in a dustbin?
No, I’m not being fair. I don’t think it was just that she couldn’t stand the sight of me. She was probably scared silly. Maybe no-one else knew about the baby and she didn’t dare tell anyone?
Imagine.
Why doesn’t she want me? She’s on her own. She can’t look after me. She’s very young. That’s why she can’t keep me.
So the pains start and she doesn’t know what to do. Maybe she’s still at school. She clutches her tummy and gasps and the girl next to her asks if she’s all right. She can’t say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m just having a baby and it’s absolute agony.’ So maybe she just shakes her head and says she’s got a bad stomach ache. Maybe she makes out it’s that time of the month. Maybe that’s what she really thinks! Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s having a baby?
No, she does know, deep down, but it’s so scary she’s not let herself think about it. She hasn’t made any plans at all because she can’t face up to it. Even now, when she can feel me struggling to get out of her, she doesn’t quite believe that I exist.
It doesn’t seem real at all, sitting in her lesson at school. I wonder what she likes best? Is it History, like me? Is she clever? Does she have a lot of friends? Maybe not. Not a friend close enough to tell. Maybe she’s quite a big girl and no-one’s really looked at her closely and noticed that she’s put on a lot of weight. She’s worn large, loose jumpers and skived off PE and somehow got away with it.
What about at home though? What about her mum?
Maybe her mum doesn’t bother about her much. Maybe she’s scared of her dad. That’s why she hasn’t told. She isn’t close to anyone at home.
That’s how it happened. She isn’t the silly sort of girl who sleeps around. She’s quiet and shy. She’s not really popular with boys but a while ago – OK, nine months ago – she was at a party, feeling a bit out of it, all set to make some excuse about having to go home early, but then this boy she’s never seen before, someone’s cousin, comes and sits down beside her, talking to her as if he really wants to get to know her.
They can scarcely hear each other because the music is so loud so they go in the kitchen and have a few drinks together. She’s not used to drinking, only had a few sips of wine and a can or two of lager before, she hasn’t liked the taste, but now she’s drinking something sweet, with fruit salad floating on top, and it slips down as easily as anything and makes her feel good. The boy makes her feel good too. He’s holding her hand now, his head close to hers, and they have another drink, and another. There are too many people in the kitchen so they take their next drinks out into the garden.
It was so hot in the kitchen she felt her face glowing as pink as her drink but it’s cold outdoors and she starts shivering. He puts his arm round her to warm her up.
‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ he says, and then he kisses her. She can’t believe this is happening to her at last. It’s too perfect, too beautiful, but then it starts to get too hasty, too worrying. What is he doing? No, she doesn’t want to, not that, please don’t. Please, he says, you know you want to really. I love you, he says. It’s the first time anyone’s ever said ‘I love you,’ and so she lets him love her and then it’s all over and he walks away and leaves her lying there in the garden all by herself.
She can’t find him when she stops crying and tidies herself and goes back into the house. She searches upstairs and downstairs. She asks people if they’ve seen him. He’s called . . .
I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t even know. He’s disappeared anyway. So she goes home and cries some more in bed and when she wakes up the next morning it’s as if it’s all been a dream. She isn’t sure it really did happen.
She doesn’t forget him. She thinks about him all day and half the night but he stops being a real person to her. It’s as if he’s a rock star, someone to daydream about.
She doesn’t think about babies. You don’t get pregnant if you have a vivid dream or fantasize about a boy in a band. But the weeks go by. Then the months. She knows perfectly well that there are all sorts of changes going on in her body but she doesn’t want to think about them. Every time anything too scary crosses her mind she sings her favourite songs over and over to blot out the worries. Of course it’s not real. It can’t happen to her.
But it is happening. It’s April 1st and she can’t keep still on her chair. She’s scared she’s going to have an awful accident in public, so she staggers to her feet and tells her teacher that she feels bad. She looks so white and sweaty that the teacher thinks she’d better go home.
She doesn’t go home. Her mum will be sprawled on the sofa watching television. She doesn’t know where she can go. The pain’s getting worse. It’s not just in her stomach. It’s growing, taking her over altogether, so that on the bus into town she can’t sit still, she can’t stop herself groaning. She has to get up before her usual stop and is sick in the gutter the second she steps off the bus.
She wonders if this can really be the reason for the pain, a simple stomach bug making her sick, but the pain is still there, the bug is getting bigger and bigger, battling inside her until she can hardly stand. People are staring at her so she drags herself away, making for the Ladies’ room in the shopping centre. She locks herself in the cubicle and lets herself groan the way she wants, but she can hear muttering outside and after a minute or two there’s a knock on the door.
‘Are you all right in there?’
She says nothing, hoping that they might just go away, but they keep on knocking. She hears keys jangling. They’ll come barging right in.
‘I’ve got this tummy bug,’ she gasps.
‘Shall I call for the store nurse?’
‘No! No, I’m OK now. I’m coming out.’
She takes a deep breath, praying for the pain to stop for a minute, and gets herself out the door, past their gawping faces, shuffling right out the Ladies’, looking for somewhere, anywhere, she can be alone.
She staggers through the shopping centre, out the back, round behind the cinema. She’s making for another Ladies’ toilet, one where there won’t b
e an attendant. It’s down an alleyway by a restaurant called The Pizza Place. She has to get there though she can barely walk now. She just wants to push this bug out of her.
The Ladies’ is shut up, locked and barred. She can’t go anywhere else. It’s too late. She can’t wait, it’s coming, she can feel it. She crouches behind the dustbins belonging to The Pizza Place, she pulls off her underclothes, pushing, pushing, pushing – and then suddenly I am born in a hot slippery rush.
I am there in her cupped hands, I’m not like the little pink powdery babies in adverts. I am newborn, purple as a plum, slimy and strange. I’m still not real. I’m an alien attached to her body.
Do I cry?
Maybe she cries, sobbing with shock as she ransacks her schoolbag and finds a penknife, rubber bands, and then clamps the scary cord and detaches us.
Detaches us for ever.
She looks at me.
I look back.
If only I could remember what she looks like now.
I look and look and look in this new bright blurry world.
Her hands hold me.
She picks me up properly.
She doesn’t cuddle me close. She opens a dustbin with one hand and drops me in with the other.
Then the lid goes down.
It is dark.
I have lost her for ever.
2
SO THERE I am. In the dustbin in the dark.
What do I do?
Cry, of course. I’m April Showers.
I’ve got a mouth like a Polo mint and lungs the size of teaspoons but I do my best. I wail and shriek and yell, my face screwed up, my knees against my chest, my fists flailing.
But the lid is on top. My little bleats are muffled. Who’s listening anyway? She’s gone. No-one comes down this alley any more now the Ladies’ toilets are closed.
I don’t give up. I cry and cry and cry until I’m as red as a raspberry, the veins standing out on my forehead, my wisps of hair damp with effort. I am damp all over because I have no nappy. I have no clothes at all and if I stop crying I will become dangerously cold.
I cry though she’s not coming back. I cry though it hurts my throat. I cry though my eyes are shut and I am getting so tired that all I want to do is give up and sleep. But I’m not going to give up. I cry . . .
And then someone tugs at the lid.
‘Kitty? Are you trapped inside? Hang on, I’ll get you out.’
Sudden light. Pink blur. A face. Not hers. A man. No, it’s a boy. Frankie. He works the evening shift at The Pizza Place to help out while he’s at college, though of course I don’t know this yet. He’s just Someone and I wail desperately for help.
‘A baby!’ He backs away warily as if I’m dangerous, his mouth hanging open. He drops the rubbish he’s carried from the kitchen. He shakes his head as if he can’t believe in me, then touches me with one fingertip, checking I’m real . . .
‘You poor little thing!’ His hands go right round me, clumsy but very gentle. He lifts me up and looks at me.
She looked at me too. I wait for him to drop me back in the dustbin. But he tenderly tucks me down inside his shirt, in the warm, even though I am damp and dirty.
‘There now,’ he says, cradling me, then he hurries back up the alley into the kitchens, looking as if he’s suddenly grown a beer belly.
‘What you got there, Frankie?’ one of the women asks. Alice. She’s old enough to be Frankie’s mum but they’re pals.
‘A baby,’ he says, really quietly so as not to startle me, though there’s a clatter and clash from all corners of the kitchen.
‘Oh sure,’ she says. ‘What is it? Did someone chuck a doll in the dustbins?’
‘Look,’ says Frankie, leaning forward so she can see into his shirt.
I murmur as he shifts, trying to clutch his skin with my tiny fists.
‘Oh my lord!’ Alice shrieks, so loudly that everyone comes running.
There’s a babble all around me and fingers poke.
‘Don’t! You’re frightening her. I think she’s hungry,’ says Frankie. ‘Look at her little mouth. It’s like she’s looking for something.’
‘Something you haven’t got, Frankie!’
‘What about some milk?’ says Frankie. ‘We could heat her up some milk.’
‘She’s too little. Newborn. We’d better call an ambulance,’ says Alice. ‘And the police.’
‘Police?’
‘Well, someone’s dumped her, haven’t they? Here, Frankie, let me take her.’
‘No. I want to hold her. I found her. She likes me, look.’
I do like Frankie. If I can’t have a mum perhaps he’ll do for a dad. I start shrieking when the ambulance men arrive and try to take me out of his shirt. I want his warmth, his skin, his care.
‘See, she does like me,’ Frankie says proudly. He tucks me back inside his shirt and comes in the ambulance with me. He stays at the hospital while the paediatrician checks me all over and waits while a nurse baths me and then wraps me up.
‘Here, Frankie, you can give the baby her first feed,’ she says.
She sits him down and puts me back in his arms. I liked it better inside his shirt against his skin but this way still feels good though I can’t snuggle properly in my new stiff sleeping suit. Frankie touches my mouth with the rubber teat of the feeding bottle. I fasten on it at once. I don’t need to be shown how to suck. I know straight away. Once I start I can’t stop. Everything blurs. I forget my mother. I forget the hospital and the doctor and nurses. I even forget Frankie. It’s just the bottle and me. I want to suck for ever. And then I sleep . . . And when I wake up Frankie isn’t there.
I cry. He doesn’t come back.
Nurses come. Nurses go.
Maybe, I think, this is the way it is. No-one ever stays. But the magic bottle appears regularly so I concentrate on that.
Then suddenly familiar hands scoop me out of my cot and I’m back down a shirt, my cheek against skin, Frankie’s skin. He’s come back for me.
Of course he hasn’t really. This is for the newspapers. I think I even make it onto television too, though no-one videoed it. Well. She might have. My mother.
Did she keep the photos when they were published the next day in the newspapers? Did she snip out the features?
DUSTBIN BABY
College student Frankie Smith, 17, found a surprise waiting for him when he did his evening shift at The Pizza Place in the High Street yesterday. He heard a high-pitched wailing coming from the refuse bins at the back of the popular restaurant.
‘I thought it was a cat,’ said Frankie. ‘I got the shock of my life when I took the dustbin lid off and saw the baby.’ Frankie has two young brothers of his own and has done his fair share of babysitting – so he had no qualms about looking after the baby, keeping it warm by tucking the tiny infant inside his shirt.
Frankie accompanied her to St Mary’s Hospital, where doctors examined the baby and said she is in perfect health in spite of her ordeal in the dustbin. They believe she was only minutes old when she was abandoned. Her mother will be in need of medical attention. She is urged to contact St Mary’s Hospital as soon as possible, where she can be reunited with her daughter.
The baby was naked, not even wearing a nappy, and so far there are no clues to her identity. She is white, with fair hair, and weighs a healthy 6 lbs. Nurses at the hospital say she is adorable. She’s been named April because she was found on April 1st.
‘I certainly thought someone was playing a joke on me,’ beamed Frankie, cuddling little baby April in his arms. ‘If her mother doesn’t want her I wish I could look after her!’
I wish it too, Frankie.
I wish you were still seventeen. I wonder how we’d get on? I’m still little, the smallest girl in my class, the smallest in every class I’ve ever been in, and that takes some serious counting. I’m skinny too, though Marion’s been trying desperately hard to fatten me up. She’s particularly keen on milk: on my cornflakes, mushed up with mu
esli, whipped into Angel Delight, baked into rice pudding, stirred into cocoa, shaken with strawberry ice-cream. She’s inventive, all right, and it seems so mean to screw my face up and shudder, but I hate milk now, even though I used to suck the stopper off my baby bottles. So I’m seriously small, Frankie, but you could hardly tuck me inside your shirt now.
I wonder what it would feel like? I wonder if you’ve got a hairy chest now and a real beer belly? You’re thirty-one. You’ve probably got babies of your own.
You look lovely in the photo in the paper. I’ve looked at it so many times it’s a wonder there’s any image left. I’ve peered at it so closely that your face and mine blur into thousands of little dots on the yellowing page. You can only see my head. The rest of me is inside your shirt.
My eyes are open and I’m looking straight at you. OK, I’m a little squinty from all the flashbulbs but I’m looking up and you’re looking down at me. You’ve got this lovely smile as if I’m really special. Maybe the photographers told you to look that way so it would make a great picture. Maybe you really felt it. Though if that was the case why didn’t you keep in touch? Maybe they wouldn’t let you, especially after I was adopted. Maybe you really tried to see me. Maybe you weren’t joking when you said you wished you could look after me.
They don’t let seventeen-year-old boys look after abandoned baby girls. It’s weird. If my mother had gone rushing to the hospital begging to be reunited with me they’d probably have let her look after me. Even though she threw me in the dustbin and shut the lid on me. But that’s because we’re related. Blood is thicker than water. She’s the only blood relative that I know about and yet of course I know nothing at all about her.
I can’t stop thinking about her. Well, not all the time. I’m happy. I’ve got a new life. Lots of people like me. I’ve got a home. I love my new school and my best friends Cathy and Hannah . . .
I wonder what they’re giving me for my birthday? Cathy will probably give me a book. Not a kid’s one. She’ll pick one of those girly books with bright covers and lots of detailed description of love sessions inside. She might well have read it first, but I shan’t mind a bit. We’ll all go into a huddle in the playground and read little snippets out loud and get the giggles.